Graduate school during maternity leave: good idea, or bad?

I did FT grad school + PT work (TAing, adjunct teaching) + babies (as a single parent, no less). It was very doable, but that was with FT childcare. A year of paid maternity leave is awesome, and as long as you are not too hung up with spending baby's first year cocooning and doing nothing but new mom/baby stuff, I think it totally makes sense to take advantage of it sooner rather than later and knock out a chunk of your grad school program. However, don't assume that because it's a distance education program that you can pop the baby in the bouncer and get through a FT course load without outside help. And you should still plan to spend 2-3 months after the blessed event doing neither work nor school. As town of cats notes, be prepared for the pregnancy itself to do a number on your energy levels and productivity. You can get other people to take care of the baby when you need to study after the baby is born, but no one is going to do the puking for you.

So, I just finished doing a graduate degree part time while working full time and promptly got pregnant (like, positive test on the same day as my last exam), and I keep telling my husband how glad I am that I didn't try to take a class during my first trimester. It is all I can do to work a full day and then go home and sit like a zombie for a while and then sleep for way more hours than I ever had time for while I was in school. There's no way I could mix in a problem set. I've never had kids + job + school - I hear people say grad school is actually a really excellent time to have a kid because your schedule is so flexible compared to when you're working - but really think twice about the full-time work + school while pregnant. Building a human is pretty tough on your body and a lot of your energy will be sucked up by the whole process.

I am a mom of eight month old, and I'm in graduate school part-time and working part-time. The only thing that makes it feasible is FT daycare. My husband is tackling easily more than half of domestic/child care, and still somedays (like today) I can barely believe I can do it. It's exhausting and I continuously feel guilty that I don't do enough with my child. In comparison grad school by itself with a baby would be a walk in the park, but there is no way we could afford it - daycare is expensive. In your situation if I could afford to not have an income while in grad school, I would try to get pregnant asap, take a year maternity leave, then go to grad school when my kid is older than one.

I have a three week old and am still recovering from a thirty hour labor plus a c-section. I cannot imagine doing anything other than caring for this baby right now. Seriously, it's a productive day when I get a shower and we go for a walk and I manage to get a load of dishes or wash in the machine. I am breastfeeding 4-5 hours a day, every 2-3 hours (more when she had her growth spurt). I sleep no more than two hours at a time, which is beyond exhausting because I never get a deep sleep. My husband can't help with night feeding just yet, but he does help out with diapers and in the evenings. I spent hours this morning just getting her to sleep; now she's finally sleeping and I can't move because she's having one of those days where she can't NOT be held. I know if i move her, i risk having to start the process all over again. This baby is probably not any harder than most babies. This will continue for a couple more months. My point? Do grad school, but not for the first 10-12 weeks. Newborns are hard. Thinking is hard when you sleep in short bursts. Don't add the major adjustment of grad school to the already major adjustment of newborn care.

Good point. Its going to be unavoidable unless I get pregnant soon, and then the best I could hope for would be to start school around the second trimester. Its possible Ill end up having a laparoscopy, which would be the best time to get pregnant, and would result in a similar timetable anyway.

I have two kids and am trying to figure out the entire graduate school thing, and I work full-time. It's hard. It's really hard. And what makes it so hard in part is the cost of daycare and keeping my health insurance. In part I have to keep my specific health insurance because one of my kids has what could still be determined a preexisting condition were I to switch companies. On the daycare end, were I to go to school full-time, I would still need full-time daycare in order to work part-time and attend classes. And there's no way right now to afford that. We had one case in my department where a graduate student went into preterm labor. Her son was born really early unexpectedly --- 28 weeks or something like that. She dropped out of the program. I don't say this to scare you, but just to point out that pregnancy, babies, and kids in general can be incredibly unpredictable --- you may have a child with higher than average needs, you may have a complicated pregnancy, you may have a perfectly normal pregnancy but be exhausted. I also recommend you look through the hundreds of Metafilter posts on parenting young children and how much work it is for that first year. I think school or work with a little baby is possible. But all three? In my life, I am not finding having kids, working, and going to school workable in the least --- mostly because all the programs I am interested in require a practicum or internship of 15 hours/week that would take me from work but I need to work to pay for the day care to allow me to do the 15 hours/week practicum.....it's a pretty terrible circle. So I'm holding off on grad school for the time being. In many ways, if I could go back, I would do graduate school first, start my career, and start having children now (I'm a little younger than you). But in so many other ways, I'm glad my kids will be teenagers when I'm in my early 40s.

I think you should plan on doing only 2 things at a time. Work and grad school now and while pregnant - it could take a while to get pregnant. Then take the year of maternity leave and do nothing but enjoy your baby for sixth months (in my opinion, three months maternity leave is too little. By six months, you have a chance that the baby will be sleeping well, or you can start sleep training.) After six months, start up grad school again part time. Quit your job at the end of maternity leave and finish up grad school full time.

could I use that time to attend school full time? I don't have kids yet, but I can answer this one for sure - no. If you need to do school in a year and you plan to have a baby at the same time, you'd have to be able to time getting pregnant by within a month or so. That is a huge gamble considering even if you have perfectly normal fertility, your chances of getting pregnant every month are only 20-25%, and once you're pregnant, your chances of miscarriage will be 15-25%. I t could easily take you 6 months to get pregnant even if you have no fertility problems. Definitely don't assume you can plan things this closely. You won't want to start trying to get pregnant until you're ready for it to possibly happen the first month you try, but it's not safe to assume you can work your life around a pregnancy plan until you've been successfully pregnant for 8-10 weeks already (when your risk of miscarriage drops to ~<5%.

I did a one year Masters degree first half pregnant, second half (my son was born in the mid-year break) with a newborn. First half was coursework on campus, second half I did three subjects by distance, one was an intensive - 4 hour lecture per week plus work at home for six weeks. For the intensive my husband did babycare sometimes, when he was away my mother came and did it. The first of those lectures was when my son was about 8 weeks old. Oh, did I mention my husband was away for at least half of the time?.... And all family was out of state (except for two weeks when my mother came to stay). But it worked. Admittedly the kid was born at an advantageous time, but I let all my lecturers know there was a chance I would have to end the semester early, and they all understood. I had a neighbour who would babysit my son when I really had to punch out a paper or some piece of work. You can make it work if you are realistic about how much you can get done, how much of a priority this degree is to you and your parenting style - if you are in to attachment parenting it might be a bit more difficult (but not insurmountable) for example.